


that clark gable grin gets all the girls

by Kells



Series: gifts, requests, and other little bits [2]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-27
Updated: 2014-03-27
Packaged: 2018-01-17 01:54:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1369573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kells/pseuds/Kells
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rebecca Barnes isn't looking for a date, but then a date isn't what Captain Kelley ends up asking for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	that clark gable grin gets all the girls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Skysoblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skysoblue/gifts).



> here you go! make of it what you please. it is only tiny but it was quite fun I think. NOW can I go back to my bruce-stephanie PR disaster?

"Sarge? Cap's asking for you again."

"Cap's asking for a slap," Sergeant Rebecca Barnes growled as she stood up abruptly. "How many times'm I gonna have to turn that kid down before he figures out that 'not tonight' means 'not ever'?"

Nancy Martin laughed at her scowling supervisor.

"Be gentle, okay? Poor guy's probably never had anyone turn him down before."

Which, Becca thought sourly, was just one of many reasons she would not be going anywhere with Captain Joseph Kelley. She threw down her headset and headed out of the office, where she found the man himself slouching quietly against the wall in an obvious and utterly ineffective effort not to draw attention to himself. He turned to her with a bright, painfully familiar smile- another, even graver strike against him. Becca glared all the way through his babbled pleasantries. 

"Look," she said bluntly, "I'm sure you're a real great guy, Cap."

"That sounds a lot less like 'take a hike' when other people say it," Kelley said in a light, self-deprecating tone which Becca instantly hated precisely because she had loved something very similar in someone very, very different.

"I'll bet. God knows the girls think I'm crazy saying this, hon, but I'm just not interested, all right? I don't- do that."

He tilted his head at her, looking confused. For a moment he even looked a little like- 

"I don't do that," Becca repeated more firmly. Scathingly, even.

"You don't do …dates?"

"No."

"Why not? You don't like dancing?"

Apparently Captain Kelley was just as persistent off-duty as he was against Schmidt's guys.

"I like it fine," she said mildly. "But the only guy I ever really wanted to dance with, he ain't ever gonna ask me."

Kelley looked as devastated as if he had been the one who had spent his teenage years feeling like a wallflower even with no shortage of willing partners.

"What idiot wouldn't want to dance with you?"

"He _was_ an idiot," she agreed vehemently, more or less ignoring his attempt at flattery in a by now well-known rush of grief and helpless anger.

"Stupid goddamn Stevie."

She had long since learnt she couldn't do anything about the catch in her voice when she said his name.

"Jackass went out and got himself killed last summer, guys who came to "investigate" wouldn't even say how he died because there wasn't any family to talk to."

She couldn't tell a stranger how deeply that had cut.

Captain Kelley looked stunned.

"What? Why- I mean-no."

No one had ever asked Becca  _why_ her friend had died. She smiled, sharp and sardonic. It was not a smile Steve would have approved of at all; she sometimes thought that was  one of the reasons she could still make that shape with her mouth.

"I wish I knew, pal. Because the world's a cruel place? Because the good die young, I guess, and he was the best there ever was. Or because I loved him, and God knows I could never have deserved that boy, so maybe there was just never any other ending for-"

"No," Kelley interrupted her like her words were hurting him. With very little warning, he flung his arms around her and hugged her way too hard. 

"I'm so sorry," he murmured into her hair. Becca was just about ready to roll her eyes and back away fast- she was already working on a sharp comment about how much she didn't need vicarious melodrama when she already worked in the WAC, but then the Captain spoke again.

"Becca-Jo, I swear to God I never knew they'd told you that." _  
_

No one else on earth had ever called her that.

"If you're playing me," she said quietly, "I will kill you with my own hands, boss." 

"I'm not," he said, and let her go so she could look up into his face. "I would never. It's really me, Jo."

In that moment of complete vulnerability, there could be no mistaking Steve Rogers' wide, entreating eyes. 

"Steve," Becca whispered, unconsciously tracing the bow of his lips with a finger that barely felt like it belonged to her. 

"Stevie, how the hell-?"

"You know," he said earnestly. "Erskine's serum, super soldier, all that stuff's true enough. I never meant to just walk out on you- it all happened so fast, and once it was done they wouldn't let me talk to anyone I knew from before. I tried to tell them you weren't before or after, you were always, but _they wouldn't let me_. They said if I wrote to you they'd have to declassify the whole project- they said I had to let them take care of it or it would be the end of Erskine's whole legacy. So I thought they'd tell you I was fine and joining up, and I could get this done and come back and hope to god you hadn't married Gary Richards just to spite me."

He had caught her hands; they were clasped between them as he went on in his Steve Rogers way, tense and insistent, his perfect conviction lending credibility to whatever insanity he was about to dump into their collective lap next.

"If I ever even dreamed they were going to tell you I was _dead_ I would have come home that same day, legacy be damned. God, I _asked_ why they were so insistent he had to have a different name, they just said it was more security. Joanna, honey, I'm so sorry."

It had to be the truth- if Becca knew anything it was that Steve Rogers couldn't lie to save his life, not least because he never really wanted to anyway. 

Her choices were tears and laughter; a hysterical giggle fought its way past her lips. Steve watched her with a cautious, wary little smile which she knew meant he saw too clearly how on edge she still was. It really was him, she realised, and her laughter grew louder, deeper- the crushing weight of loss she had almost cherished as the last she'd have of her poor sweet Steve suddenly crumbled into nothing. 

"Steve Rogers, only you could go for a walk and fall headfirst into World War II."

She was already reaching for him, grabbing him around the neck and pulling him to her one-handed as she'd always done. It didn't make as much difference as she would have thought that he was suddenly a foot taller and built entirely of some kind of iron-muscle alloy or something. He came willingly, resting a tentative hand on the small of her back as he touched his forehead to hers the way she'd always touched hers to his. She looked way up instead of a little down, but the eyes that met hers were so clearly the same that she felt suddenly ridiculous for not having ever looked at him closely enough to see it before.

"You stupid goddamn punk, this is exactly why you're not supposed to just wander off without me."

His delighted grin might have been the most gorgeous thing she'd ever seen: the insane transformation had done nothing to alter Steve's Hollywood smile. 

"Thank God," she said fervently; he looked surprised and curious in equal parts. "Thank God that mad scientist didn't screw up your perfect face, you stupid, stupid punk." 

She kissed the look of flustered, hopeful bemusement right off his stupid, stupid face. He was stiff and unresponding at first, apparently not quite willing to believe he could actually have what he wanted; yeah, Becca sighed internally, definitely Steve. Before she could pull back and order him to get his head in the game, he seemed to suddenly realise where they were and what they were (supposed to be) doing. His hands came up to cradle her face just as Becca felt warm tears spill down her cheeks. Steve made a distressed kind of sound, but she shook her head, taking his hands with her, and grinned at him to show they weren't that kind of tears. He understood, she thought, because instead of offering her any number of terrible Steve Rogers cheer-up tactics he just pulled her close again. Later, she rested her head on someone else's shoulder while Steve's hands rubbed her shoulders just the way they'd always done. 

"How come you never said?"

"Stevie, I have said at least once a week since we were seven that you shouldn't just wander off without me."

This time, he wasn't going to let her avoid the issue by resorting to teasing, stalling banter. 

"I would have asked you to dance every damn time, except you never even looked at me, it was always Gary, Frankie, Max- how could I ever compete with guys like that?"

Tall, strong and handsome, she knew he meant, with steady hands and steady jobs, not constant health scares or dreams of art school they could never afford. How could anyone, least of all someone like Steve, guess that she had been deliberately picking against her own type? To the extent that one guy could be called a type.

"How could they ever compete with you? All those guys knew from the beginning that I was only ever talkin' a dance or two, except with you."

"So you did say," he frowned, "Just not to me?"

"You never said either," she reminded him a little accusingly. "I thought about it, Stevie, I really did. But- you always seemed too good for that stuff, you know? And I kinda liked that too, I guess. My Stevie, who was way above all that dance-hall drama."

"Jo, every person we know knows I've loved you since before you told Bobby Mayer that you'd stab him in the face if he pulled your hair again."

"We were ten when I did that," Becca objected. "You told me not to be vicious, and that I should solve my problems with words instead of violence."

"You should," Steve said primly, and if she'd had any doubts at all that this too-eager beefcake were really her boy in someone else's body they would have vanished in the face of that admonishing look. 

"You do realise they _make movies_ showing how you hit people with that patriotic hubcap of yours, right?"

He grinned at her, conceding the point; she laughed at the unease in his eyes. 

"And of course you wish every time that you could win a war without hurting anyone." 

"It's awful," he murmured, not really distinguishing between the war and violence as an abstract concept. When he looked up at her, admiring, inquisitive and deeply concerned, she knew what he was going to ask before he did.

"How on earth did you end up out here?" 

"You were gone."

Properly regarded, that was the whole story.

"Soon as I realised you weren't gonna come home I knew there wasn't anything for me in Brooklyn, and I just thought-" 

Becca had never expected to have to say this out loud to anyone, least of all to Steve himself.

"I knew how much you'd wanted to enlist, right, of course I did. And I just thought someone should, for you. Not someone. Me. So I went out and asked about it, and they sent me over to some recruitment place, and all of a sudden it was basic training, remember you're fighting with the guys and for the guys but not exactly like the guys, then next thing you know, here we are."

It had been good, kind of- there was enough to do that Becca never really had time to think too hard. Sometimes she was so tired she actually fell asleep before she remembered that Steve Rogers had somehow managed to get himself killed and _she hadn''t been there with him_.

Kelley, Becca realised with a little laugh-sob thing, was his grandmother's maiden name. Sentimental goddamn fool. 

She leaned in again, breathing in the leather-dust-sweat scent that really should not have been at all attractive. 

"If you leave me again I will hit you so hard you'll wish you were fighting HYDRA."

"I believe you," Steve promised. "Becca-Jo, I need to ask you a question."

She knew that voice.

"Yes," Becca said. Steve, of course, frowned his please-be-sensible-Becca-this-is-serious frown. It made her smile just as much as it made more silly happy tears drip stupidly down her face. 

"Don't you want to hear the question before you answer?"

She met his eyes confidently.

"I know what you're asking. I'm saying yes, Steven." 

The smile beginning to tug at his lips brought an answering one to hers. 

"You better keep calling me Jo. Rebecca Rogers is a god-awful name." 

"Sarge," Nancy muttered in an undertone when Becca slipped back to her station much later than she'd intended, flushed and a little furtive, "When I said 'be gentle' that wasn't what I meant at all." 

"Just as well," Becca grinned- and it felt like her old smile, her own smile, the one that was at least partly a Steve smile. "It wasn't that gentle. Turns out that boy's a pretty thorough kisser. Apparently I'm getting married in May; you wanna come?" 


End file.
